The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was not a splendid little war. It was an especially vicious one. Some 500,000 people died, most in combat or by political execution. A right-wing coup, led by Francisco Franco and backed by Hitler and Mussolini, toppled a democratically elected government.

It was, though, a strangely literary little war. We remember it today through classic accounts like Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and Orwell’s memoir “Homage to Catalonia.” So many other significant writers and journalists poured into Spain, as observers or participants, it’s hard to keep track of them.

The French novelist André Malraux organized a squadron of volunteer pilots for the anti-Fascist resistance. The aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry reported for a Paris daily. Hemingway’s suite at the Hotel Floridain Madrid was a boozy hangout for a revolving rat pack of well-groomed foreign correspondents, including Martha Gellhorn, with whom he’d begun an affair. Dorothy Parker, Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes and W. H. Auden toured the fighting.

The war resonates visually as well. Robert Capa’s combat photographs are milestones; Picasso’s “Guernica,” painted after the carpet-bombing of that city, is among the most important artworks of our time.

Adam Hochschild’s excellent and involving new book, “Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939,” is not primarily a literary or cultural history. It’s about the moral appeal of the war, about the anti-Fascist and frequently pro-Communist idealism that made so many volunteers from the United States and other countries flood into Spain.

Yet in telling this story, Mr. Hochschild can’t help leaning heavily on the best-written accounts: books, letters, journals. Indeed, his title comes from Albert Camus. “Men of my generation have had Spain in our hearts,” Camus wrote. “It was there that they learned … that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit and that there are times when courage is not rewarded.”

What makes his book so intimate and moving is its human scale. Mr. Hochschild follows the paths of a handful or two of American (and occasionally English) volunteers, as well as journalists, and tells the larger story of the war through their tribulations.

These stories are not, in today’s parlance, of the first-person-shooter variety. The resistance was mostly too hapless, too ragtag. We might call these stories first-person shot-at. Orwell’s war ended when he took a bullet in the neck; he stood a towering 6 foot 3, and his head too easily poked over the parapet.

The Spanish Civil War was a forerunner, in a variety of ways, of World War II. Hitler introduced and honed in Spain many weapons the Allies would come to fear, like the German Stuka Ju-87 dive bomber, terrifying for its accuracy and for the dementing sound made by its wind-driven sirens.

World War II has pushed aside the Spanish Civil War in our memories. But Mr. Hochschild reminds us how riveted the world was. “While the fighting lasted, from mid-1936 to early 1939, The New York Times ran more than 1,000 front-page headlines about the war in Spain,” he writes, “outnumbering those on any other single topic, including President Roosevelt, the rise of Nazi Germany or the calamitous toll of the Great Depression.”

Roosevelt refused to involve the United States in this war, later calling its arms embargo a mistake. But some 2,800 Americans went to fight anyway. About 750 of them died there, a higher percentage of participants’ deaths than the United States military suffered in any of its 20th-century wars.

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Adam HochschildCreditSpark Media

The politics of the Spanish Civil War were, and remain, thorny. The appeal of resisting a coup backed by Hitler and Mussolini was apparent. But the defenders of the Republic, because the United States and other countries would not step in, took military aid from the Soviet Union.

This was at a moment when capitalism was in crisis, and disillusion with the Soviet Union, and Stalin, hadn’t fully set in; the Soviet Union’s economic success made it seem like a beacon of hope. Most of the American volunteers in Spain were Communists or Communist sympathizers.

For them, the war in Spain wasn’t merely a chance to rebuff Fascism. It was an opportunity to stand with Spain’s recently elected government, under which workers had taken over hundreds of factories. “Word of such events thrilled radicals abroad,” Mr. Hochschild writes. “Wasn’t this what they had long dreamed of: the people at last seizing the means of production?”

The moral problem, he notes, is that the defenders of the Republic were, in embracing the Soviet Union, “fighting for one of the finest of causes beside one of the nastiest of allies.” He asks: “If you’re in a desperate battle for survival, do you have the luxury of worrying about who your allies are?”

Orwell and Hemingway come alive in this volume. So do the two New York Times reporters, Herbert L. Matthews and William P. Carney, who reported from — and, Mr. Hochschild suggests, sympathized with — opposite sides (Mr. Matthews, the Republic, and Mr. Carney, Franco).

More than a few reporters made no pretense of objectivity. The British journalist Claud Cockburn wrote a fake article about an imaginary battle to make the Republic’s side look stronger than it was. About this trickery, Mr. Hochschild comments, “It worked.”

Mr. Hochschild, a founder of Mother Jones magazine, is the author of seven previous books, including “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa” (1998), which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

He’s a generally sympathetic observer of this conflict’s journalists, but he can also be stern. He criticizes the herd mentality that led journalists to miss one of the war’s biggest stories — how Franco’s side was propped up with oil delivered by Texaco, at the behest of an executive with Nazi sympathies.

The best stories in “Spain in Our Hearts” tend to be the smaller ones, which the author patiently teases out. We follow a Swarthmore College senior who becomes the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, for example, and a 19-year-old woman from Kentucky who heads for Spain while on her honeymoon. Details of woe pile up.

These Americans tended to be a bookish lot. Two of them had to buy special gas masks to bring to Spain, Mr. Hochschild writes, the kind that fit over horn-rimmed glasses.